One of the great things about applications on the web is that they can iterate faster than a mobile device application and much faster than a desktop application. That is why you often see advances moving more quickly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ™ for the web than you do in ‘for mobile’ and ‘for desktop’. For the bolder folks in the crowd, Adobe offers the ability to turn on Technology Previews where you can kick the tires on various features before they are released to the masses.

If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you have access to Lightroom for web. Go to http://lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your Adobe ID. All of your previously synced pictures will appear along with some other goodies. (1) if you click on the Lightroom icon in the upper left, you will see a menu with options appear. (2) Technology Previews appears on this list. Click it.

Here, you will find a list of available Technology Previews you can activate and test out in your mobile workflow. On Wednesday, September 14, 2016, Adobe made available a new web-based feature called Suggested Crop. Click on the box and then on Apply Changes. Now, when you invoke the edit command on an image in Lightroom for web, you will get the Suggested Crop feature.

Here’s a quick screen grab showing the location of the new tool in the web interface.

Zooming in, you can see that a group of suggested crops appear. Clicking on them will modify the existing crop on your image. Sometimes, more than one crop will be available at a particular aspect ratio so remember to click each button a couple of times. This is a new technology that is analyzing your image and attempting to give you aesthetically pleasing crops following classical rules while matching the aspect ratio you need. You can still crop as you have always done but now have this new tool as an alternative.

Because it is a work in progress, your feedback is very important. On the Technology Preview activation screen is a place to leave feedback. Please do so!

While Suggested Crop might not give you a better result than your careful tweaking and retweaking, it is worth considering for quick down-n-dirty crops to fit a specific ratio. Give it a try.

Featuring a new Crop-related tool for the
Creative Cloud subscribers: Guided Upright!

Along with the normal updates for new camera support, new lens support, bug fixes and the like, there are a couple of important changes to Lightroom with his update.

A New Develop Panel:

Both the Perpetual License holders and the Creative Cloud subscribers will notice there is a new panel in the Develop module.

Transform now appears, tucked neatly between Lens Corrections and Effects. The Upright functions have been migrated from the Lens Corrections to the Transform panel. The Manual tab adjustments from the Lens Corrections panel have been moved to the new Transform panel as well. The Lens Correction panel is now simplified from four tabs to two leaving Profile and Manual as the only tabs left. Lens correction adjustments and chromatic aberration reduction are the primary functions of the Lens Correction Panel now.

A New Tool:

For those of you in the Creative Cloud family, there is a new tool in addition to these changes: The Guided Upright Tool!

The Guided Upright tool lives in the upper left corner and gives you the ability to draw straight lines on your image. Simply use the tool to click and then drag along a line in your image that should be vertical and release. Drawing two vertical correction lines will cause Lightroom to automatically correct your scenes perspective. Use Aspect to fine-tune your image’s apparent width.

As you can see in the example, two lines correct the perspective of this shot by forcing what I want to be vertical, to vertical! You can draw two lines for vertical correction and two lines to correct horizontal perspective.

In this example, I’ve used four lines to correct the four sides of the door frame – two horizontal and two vertical. In addition, you have the ability use the Transform tools to tweak your automatic corrections via either Upright or the Guided Upright tool.

You are limited to four guide lines: two each, horizontal and vertical.

Anytime you correct for distortion or perspective you are removing pixels from the rectangular final image format: the essence of this tool’s exposure in Holy Crop! You can either use the Scale slider in the Transform section of the new Transform panel or click the Constrain Crop option with which Lightroom users are so familiar to remove the excess empty space spawned in these types of transformations.

One of the coolest parts of this new tool is that you can zoom in to apply it. How often have we wished the Level tool in the Crop panel would allow us to zoom in on an image to use it? The Guided Upright guides can be inserted, deleted and tweaked all while zoomed in on your wonky image.

In the image above, the image is zoomed 1:1 to allow for more precise placement of the guides.

All in all, this is a great new tool for wide-angle photographers, particularly those whose subject matter skews architecturally. The ante has been upped for correcting perspective in Lightroom. A tool like this was long overdue and very welcome.

Adobe offered us a sneak-peek today on a new feature coming soon to Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud. As you may remember, Cropping (and anti-cropping) are one of the first things to consider as you build a stronger composition. But, rather than drone on, I have a video preview for you.

Cornered: Breaking the rules…

We’ve been taught to watch the corners. In fact, any composition class worth its time and money will tell you to watch the corners. Distractions, stray light and other nasty things creep in from the corners. Sometimes, critical story-telling action takes place in the corners too and you have to be able to discern and crop accordingly to take advantage.

My daughter Whitney has a new puppy named Ludo (after the large monster in the movie Labyrinth). He is a 8 week-old Newfoundland. Wrangling a young and recently adopted puppy is a challenge – especially in a studio environment. Some of the captures not only stretched the sensibilities of composition, they struggled to keep the energetic youngster in frame!

Above is the original in-camera framing – uncropped. The focus of the shoot was to get Ludo’s puppy picture. Ludo is the subject. He is center frame, in focus and well lit just like I planned. I shot wide so that I could ensure that his entire body would remain in frame no-matter how much he moved about. After that, it was simply a matter of keeping him on the white seamless. As I went through the images in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I noticed how nice the interaction was between Ludo and his new owner/mommy Whitney. I sought to crop this image while keeping their relationship intact and using it as my story.

With my Rule of Thirds overlaid on the capture, I examined the image for items that could be sacrificed and items that needed removal for the sake of distraction relief. Marked in read were the problem areas I saw. The edges of the seamless needed to be eliminated. Whether I cropped the area outside the seamless off or filled it in with white, that area had to go. Because this is Holy Crop! it was cropped off. I wanted to leave my daughter in frame to give a more robust story to the puppy’s pose. He is looking at her – she is looking at him. That interaction is powerful! The angles of their lines of sight, suggest a diagonal composition.

Cropping to the edge of the seamless right and left tightened up the composition nicely but left a little too much space to the right. The space under Ludo’s feet was pretty close to where I wanted it so I let it stay untouched. I only had a partial face of Whitney to begin with so I didn’t risk cutting any more out off of the top. One eye was enough to establish the line of sight. With pretty close to a full arm and part of the upper torso, I was confident I had enough person to scream ‘person’.

Let’s talk about balance. Good composition has a balance. Though Whitney is bigger than Ludo, Ludo is closer to camera than Whitney. Ludo is darker than Whitney meaning he holds the weight of the photo. Ludo is also the primary subject of the photo. The trick to balancing Whitney in the upper left with Ludo in the lower right is manage space.

I’ve blacked out the four ninth sections of the image where nothing is taking place. It is just empty space. To balance the two entities and compose them successfully in the corners, I have to keep them within these bounds. Both square areas need to have reasonable composition respectively when viewed as disjoint images for this to work. The angle between the centers of the two square areas needs to be approximately the angle of the line joining the eyes of both. A little fine tweaking of the right edge inward allowed me to ensure that the angle worked.

Ludo takes up four squares. Whitney takes up one square. Their positions in space satisfy the balance between the objects and their relationship as defined by the line of sight. What we are left with is a portrait of a puppy, owner and the story of their first photo session together.

Composition is possible working from the corners. Watch your interaction of your corner subjects and give proper presence to the subject and their supporting players! Balance and motion are key. Compose each corner separately and make sure the relative positions support the movement of our eyes around the image.

Adobe has announced the release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC2015.4/6.4. This update provides the usual new camera support, new lens support, bug fixes, performance enhancements, and new camera tethering support. Complete details can be found at the Lightroom Journal Blog.

The cool announcement as far as Holy Crop! is concerned is a new feature for the Creative Cloud subscribers of Lightroom. And, it is a Crop-Related Tool!

Introducing Boundary Warp

Below the Auto Crop check box is a new slider called Boundary Warp. Boundary Warp is a new feature that allows you to deal with the irregular boundaries left after stitching together a panorama. You can see in the three-image sample stitch above that there are white spaces (transparent areas) left top and bottom after invoking Photo Merge. Sliding the Boundary Warp slider off of zero, Lightroom will attempt to fill in these transparent areas – intelligently.

As I slide the Boundary Warp slider toward 100, portions of the image expand to remove the empty areas left by the stitching process – all without leaving Lightroom! If you want to avoid creating a massive Tiff file and round-tripping to Photoshop, this is a good option. Formerly Auto Crop would chop off the extra pixels to eliminate the empty space or you could use Photoshop Content Aware Fill to work those image out. The beauty of Boundary Warp is in the DNG File that is your result. No baked-in settings of a Tiff and no huge disk space requirements are your benefits. Give it a try!

Last Season’s Crops

Holy Crop’s mission: Improving your image through cropping.

Holy Crop is the blog dedicated to all things cropping.

Learn how to crop an image.
Discover how to improve composition.
Find different strategies for cropping an image.
Analyze how to make your image as strong as it can be.

Holy Crop touches on all the software tools, the art theory, and the latest advances in camera technology as it brings you the most comprehensive coverage of the single greatest improvement you can make to your image: The Crop.

Rikk Flohr: The Cropist

Holy Crop!™ is a trademark of Rikk Flohr and Fleeting Glimpse Images, LLC